Review: Night Sky with Exit Wounds, by Ocean Vuong

Efficiency expert = smart and lazyTwitter Facebook Tumblr Feed The Daily Rumpus Get Our Overly Personal Email Newsletter enter your email Search The Rumpus « Previous post like this Subscribe Next post like this » Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong Reviewed By Jeff Nguyen April 30th, 2016 There are poets who help us live with death and poets who lift us from the smoke of total oblivion. Ocean Vuong writes poems as svelte and sturdy as fire escapes, bridging readers with the most fragile and fraught of situations. After paying his dues as the refugee troubadour of Burnings (2010), he honored the lives of gay suicides in No (2013). He has since read at the Library of Congress, grand-marshalled at poetry slams, and presided as royalty on the queer circuit. His full-length debut Night Sky with Exit Wounds shows us what it means to shatter the oracle of public expectations, recovering the heroism of the helpless and staring the abyss into submission. Vuong says he discovered the public library after seeing John Wayne mow down painted actors with his M16: “I went to the library to figure out how evil I was. Through books, I learned you could use words to make a person good or bad. Just like magic.” Born in Saigon, Vinh Quoc Vuong came here in 1990, when American remorse for inciting Communist reprisals and re-education camps created the rickety conditions for a second exodus of refugees from Vietnam. Barely two years old, he and six other family members ended up in a one-room apartment in Hartford, Connecticut, where the difficulties of adjusting to the new culture and economy soon took its toll on the men. The uncle who worked in a nail salon committed suicide; the father, a South Vietnamese war veteran, inflicted on the family his own set of frustrations. In these poems. describing the Father as though he were a stranger on a deserted island. and abstract guises) through the act of consorting with the enemy camp of his lovers. is as an epic of vulnerability. or repurposing the bullet’s ricochet as a thread to sew together stories of the wounded. Escaping the vertigo of violence means fashioning an aesthetics based on the toughness and tenderness of the grandmothers. The composite portrait of the Father as epic hero is ambivalent in the extreme. found The way a green bottle might appear At a boy’s feet containing a year He has never touched. as a Wagnerian rendition of “White Christmas” scores the evacuation of Saigon. Vuong asks in poems like “Detonation” and “Telemachus. but they are nonetheless subject to the compassionate distortions of his own creative feeling. whose luminous flame catches the toughest of brutes at their most susceptible and the most susceptible of survivors at their fiercest. The search for a more accommodating form began in Burnings. One way of reading Night Sky.” This vantage point of bodily care enables Vuong to glimpse what blind Homer had missed. Rome. he goes for dreamy deflation. He is so still I think He could be anyone’s father. mothers. Even though the boy can’t disavow his physical likeness. / are you listening? The most beautiful part / of your body is wherever /your mother’s shadow falls. and reeducation camps. If the strength of Vuong’s identifications with women and children anchors these poems. Rather than shooting for the heroic sublime. the Vietnam he imagines is a chimerical fiction.” or can a boy disown such a legacy? The answer is the bullet hole in his back. We lived as though we would never get a second chance.” The early “Telemachus” anticipates how the boy will find temporary relief from the inescapable shadow of the Father (in his literary. Yet he also menaces in the guise of a GI raping the farm girl or the Chinese mafia who bequeaths his nastiness in a shoe box: “I hold the gun / & wonder if an entry wound in the night / would make a hole as wide as morning.So when the mother reclaimed her freedom through divorce. brimming With seawater. he asserts his ability to control its manifestations: “the face / not mine — but one I will wear / to kiss all my lovers good-night.” The competing claims that male violence and female witness make on the poet’s imagination is one of the major themes of Night Sky.” recalls Vuong. she renamed her son Ocean: “like that expansive stretch of water. it is because he knows all too well the casualties of being a Man. “the difficulty of coming out [though] was very small compared to the horrors of bombs. then. “let me weave this deathbeam / the way a blind woman stitches a flap of skin back / to her daughter’s ribs.” Does a boy even need a father to be an artist.” Like the meaning of his own name. New York. and the Middle East. I touch both nations but belong solely to neither. Vuong’s blazing imagery may derive their intensity from the oral traditions of his family. so we rarely had any prejudice. bullets. the Trojan warrior on fire will take on the likeness of “a boy in a red dress / the red of shut eyes” or a nun ablaze running towards a helicopter. and daughters who nurture the boy’s creativity: “I came out to my mother when I was eighteen. where Vuong fashioned a . flashing with the “hideous head” of Troy. We see him rubbing his cheek against a dolphin and muffling his tears in the bathroom. As he puts it in his new volume. (7) Taking the wind out of the epic simile—often introduced by the way.” The unconditional love of the mother carries over in this volume through the delightful transformation of the “toothless war woman” who nags her “Stupid Boy” into the gay patron saint of the Sun shining on her Frank O’Hara: “Ocean. personal. or as if’—is a hallmark of Vuong’s vexed epic. _____nor you with me. hinted at in his chapbook No. And yet I do not want to be in love with you. ……………………… _____here. intended to evoke “across the hulls” of two flaming ships “a makeshift bridge. personality—in public?…if it was embedded into my daily language—and if I didn’t have to apologize for it?…What if a fire escape could be made into a bridge?” The opposite of the armor and walls that men build up. has given Schuyler’s flabby indolence and too-close-for-comfort intimacies a tougher workout (as he generally does in his streamlined response to the chattier misfits of the New York School).stanza with a diving plank. A precedent for his new stanza. he hangs himself from a weight bar when the cruel gossip pushes him over the edge. he has latched onto the tenuous bridge of the fire escape that embodies the iron will of the feeble. The scandal of tenderness that is “On Earth.” What if poetry. Having fallen short of the benchmarks of a girlfriend and a job (that isn’t painting nails). the space of discourse occupied by the fire escape: I could spend a whole hour sitting across the street from a six-floor walkup studying the zigzags that clung to a building filled with so many hidden lives. manifesto. and the embarrassing. however. _____Your other hand pointing your daddy’s revolver _____to the sky. and Visible Desperation” (2014) relates the story of his uncle whose “quiet demeanor” gives his irritations no relief. Stars dropping one by one in the crosshairs. wrought to describe the most precarious of intimacies: It’s not too late. This fascination with fire escapes is evident in an essay he wrote for The Rumpus. he asks. _____Who do not like to be touched. the unabashed. were a sanctuary for the realm of the unpleasant. We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is just one of many fine examples of Vuong’s fire escape in action. however. That a boy sleeping _____beside a boy . As Vuong processes this failure of communication.” With his move to New York. is the unabashed and double-decker line of James Schuyler’s (Pulitzer Prize winning epic) The Morning of the Poem: How easily I could be in love with you. he hammers the zigzags into a svelte structure of enjambments that carry the rhythm of alarm and alleviation across the line break. All that richness and drama sealed away in a fortress whose walls echoed with communication of elemental or exquisite language…and yet only the fire escape…spoke…with the most visible human honesty …what would the fire escape look like if I were to wear it on my person. and cultural history. Vuong goes so far as to express admiration for the way people adorn this symbol of “visible desperation” with tacky flower pots and bike racks to make it a more livable extension of their homes. “The Weight of our Living: On Hope. Our heads haloed _____with gnats & summer too early to leave any marks. Already more than skin can hold. A fantasia of memoir. (CPJS 259) Vuong. he channels a famous lunchtime walk to develop his own answer to the intimate mode of address that Frank O’Hara called “Personism. With Night Sky. the fire escape answers to Vuong’s desire for a form that makes it easier to flaunt one’s vulnerability rather than conceal it. Your hand _____under my shirt as static intensifies on the radio. Fire Escapes. “Strange business” the chinky Chinamen said and _____from the kitchen window. Vuong not only takes Schuyler to school on this strange business of intimacy. the boys refuse the stars’ claims on their lives.” “I am ready to be every animal / you leave behind. Pointing the gun towards the stars. shed _____like week-old lilies. I see the rifle coming . (45) These lines are the suspenseful conclusion to a series of anonymous escapades with younger and older men.” “because that’s what you say when a stranger steps out of summer / & offers you another hour to live. _____sharpened through wet leaves. like pajamas. Vuong uses the mismatch of expectations as a pretext for celebrating his triumphs over the inhibitions of the Old World and the underestimations of the New: “My mother said I could be anything / I wanted.” In these bohemian fairy tales.” Some readers may be shocked by the boy’s ownership of his status as exotic fetish. I am the doe whose one hoof cocks _______________like a question ready to open _____roots. leaving the evidence on the doorstep. who having fallen out of favor with society in one way or another. That to say your name is to hear the sound of clocks _____being turned back another hour & morning _____finds our clothes on your mother’s front porch. Vuong clears in the minefield of hostility a magical field for their heartbeats. Conflating the godly and the gutter like his patron Saint Genet. the sangfroid of a doe appears to foil the father-son lesson of how to be a brute: _____Heavy with summer. ………………. offer a boy respite from the turbulence of his own situation. we see Asian boyhood kiss mom—or the gal pal— good-bye to meet the randy wolf in the woods.” he writes in the defiant epigram “Thanksgiving 2006. & like any god -forsaken thing. yet this is a risk that offers a psychic vacation from the grave of one’s inescapable past. he has shed the lily language of Oscar Wilde. Although the anonymous sexual encounter has been a rite of passage for queer poets. I want nothing more _______________than my breaths. In “The Smallest Measure. He gives us the candor of the branded in this scene of two boys who talk each other down from the brink of gay suicide.” the kind of vulnerability that the boy inhabits in these situations transmutes to a transgression against patriarchy. Here. The faultless construction of these lines safeguards a series of variable intimacies whose fragility is a function of the opinion that makes suicide an alternative at all. “thank you thank you thank you.must make a field _____full of ticking. Ocean Vuong. Then again. sweets. Was Emily Dickinson wrong in identifying with the master’s Loaded Gun? No. and sours. he’s probably a douchebag. Reviews Filed Under: Poetry. Ocean Vuong is that rare architect of accommodation. His gift is not for avocados and fresh laundry. You can also subscribe without commenting. then gone.. He is working on a book about the theatre. At a time when poets are resigned to making boredom a commodity. but Vuong is a devout Buddhist. a one-shot review of the arts addressed to the bitters. he reminds us that the limits of intimacy are an exhilarating frontier. See him tart up his tears at the citricdistrict. Jeff Nguyen is the ivy-league Vietnik busking for a public. please. My one reservation about this book is that it is not heavy enough with summer. very few poets can do what Vuong does. More from this author → Tags: Books. in the next volume. and that the most urgent communications begin with the overture of letting down one’s defenses. Reviews Related Posts The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop Edited by Kevin Coval. is a question mark. like the poem. Quraysh Ali Lansana. channeling divinity from a godforsaken position.. he sets out from the wreckage of his past towards a hard-won horizon of blunder and wonderment. The Rumpus Blog . His nonviolent doe is a cross between Nature’s answer to a drag queen (planting her fierceness in the sight lines of adversity) and the Buddhist’s koan or paradoxical anecdote intended to demonstrate the limits of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment. but for shocking the most jaded of readers with devastating earnestness. Heavy with summer. and Nate Marshall The Taxidermist’s Cut by Rajiv Mohabir Widening Income Inequality by Frederick Seidel landscape/heartbreak by Michelle Peñaloza Dead Man’s Float by Jim Harrison Leave a Reply Your Name Name (required) Your Email Mail (required) (will not be published) Your Website Your Comment Here. “If a guy tells you his favorite poet is Jack Kerouac. poetry. (73–74).” We need more of this stand-up. Website Submit Comment Notify me of followup comments via e-mail._______________down. the doe. her cocked hoof springing the roots of life rather than the bullets of death. giving the most precarious situations or embarrassing of grievances of our culture a sound environment in which they can thrive. Jeff Nguyen. He has written about the fierce factor for Jacket2 and has a forthcoming essay in Electric Gurlesque (2016). As he kisses and tucks the parents in their beds. we’ve got essays. to do the same. as readers. so we’re here to give you something more challenging. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet. reviews. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing. interviews.(more) © 2012 THE RUMPUS Navigation HOME SECTIONS Art Books Comics Film Homepage Originals Music Other Politics Sex Television FAQS Writer’s Guidelines Who Are We Subscriptions Contact Us Advertise RSS Feeds . passionate and true (and sometimes very. We don’t say that lightly—we’re thrilled you’re here. commenters or future contributors. music. and to invite each of you. to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how. to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path.net. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave. film and poetry—along with some kick-ass comics.Most recent posts from The Rumpus National Poetry Month Day 30: Sophie Klahr Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong National Poetry Month Day 29: Danez Smith The Taxidermist’s Cut by Rajiv Mohabir National Poetry Month Day 28: Geffrey Davis Hello Welcome to TheRumpus. advice. very funny). At The Rumpus.